My Blog List

Friday, 26 February 2016

A chapter has closed in a strange story
on the fringes of the Mumbai terrorist attacks of 1993 which left 257 people
dead. The Bollywood star, Sanjay Dutt, aged 56, has been released from prison
after serving 5 years for buying guns from the terrorists.

Dutt’s defence was that he had needed
the weapons to protect his family during riots in which Muslims fought Hindus.

The son of a Hindu father and a
Muslim mother, he was one of India’s most popular stars, specialising in
tough anti-hero roles. Sentencing him at his trial, the judge said: ‘Don’t get
perturbed. You have many years to go and work like the Mackenna’s Gold actor Gregory Peck.’

A hundred people were convicted for
their role in the bombings, with 12 given the death penalty and 20 others
sentenced to life imprisonment. For
more, see A Disastrous History of the
World.

Saturday, 20 February 2016

This week’s bus crash in Ghana was
one of the deadliest in history. 71 people were killed, and another 13
seriously injured, when a coach collided head-on with a lorry carrying
tomatoes near the town of Kintampo, about 260 miles from the capital, Accra.

It was travelling from the country’s
second city Kumasi to the northern town of Tamale. Investigators have said the
bus was overloaded. It should have been carrying only 63 passengers.

A survivor
reportedly told police that the vehicle had brake problems. Another alleged the driver had
been going too fast, and that he had ignored pleas to slow down.

Rescue workers had to use chainsaws
to try to get to people trapped in the wreckage. There was anger about graphic
images of the accident that were posed on social media, while Ghana’s president,
John Mahama, went on to Twitter to offer his condolences. (See also my blogs of 5 January and
23 February 2010 and 9 February 2013.)

Sunday, 14 February 2016

We still do not know what caused
this week’s German train crash in Bavaria, in which 10 people died. The trains
collided head-on on a stretch of single line track, but safety precautions introduced
after another fatal accident in 2011 should have made this impossible.

As a German train approaches a red
signal, an alarm is supposed to go off in the driver’s cab, and if he fails to
stop, the brakes are supposed to go on automatically. Since the crash, there
has been speculation that a signal controller may have turned off the automatic
system, or even that someone else may have sabotaged it.

Rail crashes have often provided
the spur for safety innovations. So in 1989, five people were killed at Purley
in South London when one train ran into the back of another after going through
a red light, even though the driver’s cab was fitted with an alarm that sounded
when the train was approaching the danger signal.

After that, a system called ATP
(Automatic Train Protection) was introduced to apply the brakes automatically
if the driver ignored a red light. But that did not prevent a crash between a
passenger and a goods train at Southall in West London in 1997 (see picture) in which seven
people died. Neither the alarm system nor the ATP were working. For more, see London's Disasters.

Sunday, 7 February 2016

The British government has spent up to
£400 million trying to find out the truth about Bloody Sunday in 1972, when 13
civilians were killed by the army, with reports that a number of soldiers may
face being charged with murder.

Less than three years later, in the
Birmingham pub bombings of November 1974, 21 people were killed by IRA bombers,
and 200 more seriously injured, but the authorities seem to be a good deal less
enthusiastic about getting to the bottom of what happened.

Inquests on those killed were
closed when six men were convicted of the mass murder, but they were the wrong
men, and they were released in 1991. No one has ever been found responsible, and now
some of the victims’ families are trying to get the inquests reopened, but West
Midlands police are apparently going to oppose them.

Last week the police interviewed a
Dublin solicitor who was the IRA’s ‘director of intelligence' at the time of the
bombings. He expressed his ‘shame and regret’ over them. But as you will see
from my earlier blog of November 21, 2014, there are some very odd things about
the police investigation. The authorities have decreed that an independent review of it
should remain secret for another 54 years, and a lot of evidence, including
another bomb that failed to explode, has gone missing.

Monday, 1 February 2016

On this day…..42
years ago, fire broke out in the 25-storey Joelma Building in the centre of Sao
Paulo in Brazil. The blaze happened just a few weeks after the disaster movie, The Towering Inferno, was released, and
it became known as ‘the real Towering Inferno’.

The fire was started by an
electrical fault on the 11th floor, and spread rapidly thanks to the
ready availability of combustible materials such as paper, plastics and wooden
walls and furniture, and within a few minutes, flames were leaping right up to
the roof.

When the blaze began, there were
more than 750 people inside, but the building had no emergency exits, fire
alarms or sprinkler systems. More than 170 fled to the roof, but the
heat and smoke foiled a helicopter rescue, and about 40 were killed jumping
down or trying to get to firemen’s ladders out of reach below them.

Others died of suffocation attempting
to escape via the building’s escalators, and altogether up to 189 people were
killed. After the disaster, Brazil’s fire regulations were tightened up.

About Me

Author of 'Storm: Nature and Culture', 'Flood: Nature and Culture','Britain's 20 Worst Military Disasters','London's Disasters','The Disastrous History of London' ('Capital Disasters' in hardback), 'A Disastrous History of Britain', 'A Disastrous History of the World', 'Disaster! A History of Earthquakes, Floods, Plagues and Other Catastrophes', and 'Shutdown. Anatomy of a Shipyard Closure.' Producer/director of more
than 40 tv documentaries. Former radio producer. Freelance writer for publications such as the Guardian, Independent, Daily Express, Observer, New Statatesman. Freelance communications consultant and adviser. http://www.disasterhistorian.com/